While older versions of the AMI and its packages will continue to be available for launch in Amazon EC2 even as new Amazon Linux AMI versions are released, we encourage users to migrate to the latest version of the AMI and to keep their systems updated. In some cases, customers seeking support for an older version of the Amazon Linux AMI through AWS Support may be asked to move to newer versions as part of the support process.

To upgrade to Amazon Linux AMI 2016.09 from 2011.09 or later, run sudo yum clean all followed bysudo yum update. When the upgrade is complete, reboot your instance.

Remember that the Amazon Linux AMI repository structure is configured to deliver a continuous flow of updates that allow you to roll from one version of the Amazon Linux AMI to the next. Please consult our lock-on-launch FAQ for a discussion of how you can lock an instance (either a new launch or one already running) to a particular version of the Amazon Linux AMI repositories.

Due to a bug that existed in our dracut package from previous releases, BTRFS-managed RAIDsets were not automatically being mounted at boot. For customers experiencing issues with BTRFS-managed RAIDsets, we recommend updating to the latest version of dracut and rebuilding the initramfs. This can be done with the following commands:

# Update dracut

$ sudo yum update dracut

# Make a backup of the initramfs in case errors are encountered and must be rolled back

With this release, we'd like to announce the introduction of our new SNS topic which can keep you informed of our regular Amazon Linux AMI releases. To begin receiving notifications about our new AMI releases, please subscribe from the us-east-1 region to our SNS topic:

The latest in the Python 3.x series has been integrated with our existing Python experience and is now available in the Amazon Linux AMI repositories alongside the 2016.09 release. This includes the associated virtualenv and pip packages, which can be used to install and manage dependencies.

Example Commands

$ yum search python35

$ sudo yum install python35-virtualenv

$ sudo alternatives --set python /usr/bin/python3.5

$ virtualenv-3.5 myproject

The Python version for /usr/bin/python defaults to Python 2.7, but it can be managed via alternatives. If you want /usr/bin/python to execute Python 3.5, even after installing other Python versions, run sudo alternatives --set python /usr/bin/python3.5 or run sudo alternatives --config python to set the version interactively.

Based on customer requests, PHP 7.0 has been added to the Amazon Linux AMI repositories and is now available to be used alongside our existing PHP ecosystem. PHP 7.0 can be installed via sudo yum install php70. PHP 7.0 is able to be installed in parallel with PHP 5.5 and PHP 5.6, and the version in use is controlled by alternatives. It is important to note that PHP 5.5 and PHP 5.6 have higher alternatives priority. If you have PHP 7.0 installed in parallel to other version, 5.5 and 5.6 will take precedence as the default.

If you want to ensure your environment will use PHP 7.0 even after installing PHP 5.5 or 5.6, run sudo alternatives --set php /usr/bin/php-7.0 or run sudo alternatives --config php to set the default interactively.

PHP 7.0 maintains its own configuration files separate from the other system PHP versions, so changes made to PHP 7.0 will not be applied to either of PHP 5.5 or PHP 5.6 (and vice versa).

PostgreSQL 9.5 was released earlier this year and it is now available in our Amazon Linux AMI repositories as a separate package from our other PostgreSQL offerings. PostgreSQL 9.5 is available via sudo yum install postgresql95.

Based on numerous customer requests, the Amazon Linux AMI 2016.09 repositories include the latest stable nginx 1.10 release. You can install or upgrade to the latest version with sudo yum install nginx.

We've made a variety of changes for this release to improve the boot performance of the Amazon Linux AMI. There is about a 20% improvement in launch time on average from 2016.03.0 to this release, 2016.09.0. We aim to continue to provide a performant instance boot experience with future Amazon Linux AMI releases.

We've added the Amazon SSM Agent to the Amazon Linux AMI package repositories. The SSM Agent allows you to utilize the Simple Systems Management Service RunCommand API to configure and execute code on your EC2 instances. The Amazon SSM Agent can be installed with sudo yum install amazon-ssm-agent and subsequently started with sudo /sbin/start amazon-ssm-agent.

We've made it easier to add to your system's list of trusted CA certificates. With update-ca-trust enabled, classic CA certificate and trust configurations are replaced by symbolic links to dynamically created configurations. You can now add CA certificates to a central location on your system without modifying any of the system's provided CA certificate configurations.

To take advantage of this feature, you can add your PEM or DER formatted certificates to /etc/pki/ca-trust/source/anchors and run sudo update-ca-trust.

This feature is only enabled by default for new launches of 2016.09 instances; customers upgrading from previous releases must enable this feature via sudo update-ca-trust enable.

The Amazon Linux AMI team is constantly trying to deliver the most useful set of features to our customers that we can, while maintaining a high bar for security. As upstream software vendors begin focusing efforts on newer versions of tools, it sometimes becomes infeasible for us to continue to provide updates to older versions of packages. As such, we'd like to begin deprecating some of our older packages.

We're aiming to remove the following packages from the Amazon Linux AMI repositories. Additionally, these packages will only receive updates to security vulnerabilities rated as 'critical' until such time as they are removed: